Data Collections

Mapping of the

Emergency Response Teams

to the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Venues

Data Collections

The majority of my data was obtained from the S: Drive. All of the data I used from S: Drive was in ArcView format. The data in Shapefile format was converted into IDRISI vector format by importing it using the ESRI SHAPEIDR format. Other data was found from the official website of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics as it gave me the locations of which venues were the events are going to be held in Greater Vancouver. And also I found data from the website called "Found Locally" where it gave me not only the locations of where some of the venues are but it also gave me the locations and addressed of hospitals around the GVRD as well as maps showing where emergency personal are located. That being where each of the police departments and fire departments are located in each municipality in the GVRD. And I also referred to the White Pages as to where police and fire departments are located. Although both sites were good in give me information I needed, the "Found Locally" website was very valuable as it gave me the locations of most of the venues, hospitals, police departments and the fire departments. And with that site giving me the locations, I was able to digitize them on the map.

I only focused on the indoor venues within the GVRD as the doing the ski hills in Whister and West Vancouver would have been too much to do and so I decided to keep it simple. For the fire departments I only focused the ones located within Vancouver and Burnaby as these fire stations in these cities are close to the Olympic venues. And as for the police departments I focused on a few of them, most notablely the Vancouver Police Deptartment, both the Burnaby and North Vancouver RCMP, the New Westminster Police Department, and the West Vancouver Police Department. As again same with the fire departments, these police departments are closer to the venues. As for the hospitals, I included all of the major ones within the GVRD and I feel it is important to include them because if something bad did happen the hospitals would be flooded with patients and the distance of the hospital from the venues could mean life or death if something did happen.

Quality of the Data

The data quality from the "Found Locally" website is very frequently updated and is very accurate which helped me very much in digitizing the locations of the venues, hospitals, police and fire departments.

As for the GVRD data, the data from this set was in a Shapefile format and they had to be converted over to IDRISI. When converted it was in vector format, then I had to convert it to raster format using INITIAL option from IDRISI and as well the RASTERVECTOR option. I also had to use another file called "GVRD50a" to help me convert the map of the GVRD into raster format. To do that I had to to use ArcCatalog to help me import into IDRISI in a .tiff file format. In IDRISI, I then imported the .tiff file. I imported through the government/data provider formats in the import menu of IDRISI. The data I used for my analysis included streets but since there were so many, I had to narrow them to highways, ways, streets, and avenues. And also a map showing all of the municipalities within the GVRD. However the map showed munipalities from the FVRD as well as some electoral areas but those were taken off as they had no importance to my analysis. The projection used was the us83tm10 reference projection in metres. However it is unknown what year and how old the GVRD street data as well as the municipal data was taken. So due to the lack of metadata, the accuracy is unknown for the streets.

Some errors that may occur may be location errors as I digitized most of the points myself. Even though I tried to accurately digitize the points to the best of my ability, errors may come about due to the scale of the resolution of the image and human error.

Sources:

Found Locally

http://www.foundlocally.com/Vancouver/Travel/Map-Emergency.htm.

2010 Winter Games:

http://www.winter2010.com/Default.htm.

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Sources of the pictures used:

www.gamesbids.com/english/bids/vancouver.shtml.

www.canucks.com/.../general_motors_place_b.jpg.

www.sans.org/northpacific/npacific.htm.

http://212.227.215.73/magnat/vancouvereng.html.